Podcasts from the Edge

By TimesLIVE PodcastsNews News Commentary

Podcasts from the Edge episodes

October 24, 2022 Big Batteries? Here’s a way to do it our way...
s South Africa's efforts to plug the gaps in our electricity supply grind slowly forward there's a clear hole emerging in the plans for new, renewable energy generation. The hole is the absence of storage, of batteries, that are being rapidly deployed now around the word at a fast pace. In SA though, batteries are a sort of afterthought. Assuming the government planned 513MW of battery storage are actually built, storage will still be just a fraction of the new generation procured. It doesn't make sense. In this edition of Podcasts from the Edge, Peter Bruce talks to Frank Spencer, head of deployment at Bushveld Energy, a subsidiary of Bushveld Mining, which is listed in London. Bushveld is building a plant near East London to make electrolyte for its Vanadium Redox Flow Battery. Spencer says a plentiful supply of vanadium in SA shouldn't be over looked as the rest of the world rushes into lithium ion batteries. The VRFB lasts way longer, doesn't catch fire and we can build it here. To prove it, Bushveld not only making electrolyte in East London, it is building a 3MW solar plant at its mine near Brits in North West to feed a new 1MW/h battery, a demonstration VRFB, to show potential new clients. If Bushveld gets it right, towns and cities could go the direct battery route and get Eskom to charge them when it is not load-shedding. It’s a new option. Different, and local.

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32 min
October 17, 2022 A Boer made a plan and that’s a pebble bed nuclear reactor orbiting above us
South Africa had spent around R10bn developing the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor before abandoning the nuclear project when Jacob Zuma became President. He had a much bigger nuclear ambition cooked up with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Now, however, Andre Pienaar, a pioneering Afrikaner venture capitalist who lives his life between Washington and London has a surprise in store. He is invested in a US company that has a contract to build what will be a new space station on the hulk of the existing International Space Station (ISS) that has been orbiting earth for the last 23 years. He is also invested in another US company racing to win a competition to build the first Small Modular Reactor in Washington State in the US. X-Energy’s product is a direct descendent of the PMBR and a clutch of the scientists working on it are South African. Or were. And whether X-Energy wins the Washington contract or not, Pienaar, whose roots in South Africa still run deep — he was instrumental in the establishment of the corruption-busting Scorpions — is going to put an X-energy PMBR onto his own space station. “Its happening," he tells Peter Bruce in this compelling edition of Podcasts From The Edge. Pienaar is convinced that a new generation of small, even portable, nuclear reactors is a large part of the answer to the scramble for a carbon-free future. Governments around the word are curious. The British have given Rolls Royce more than £200m to develop a small nuclear reactor because, well, if you can run a submarine or an aircraft carrier on a nuclear reactor, how cool would it be to run a small town, or a large city, on one? In a few years’ time we’ll be able to see the new, expanded, ISS passing us by in the night sky. If its very bright it might be because of the pebble bed reactor inside it.

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44 min
August 22, 2022 The system is broken
Donald MacKay, director of XA International Trade Advisers in Johannesburg is arguably the most knowledgeable outsider on the inner workings of South African Byzantine trade policy mechanisms — the matrix between the International Trade Administration Commission, the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the National Treasury and the South African Revenue Service is pretty much impenetrable but MacKay has stared at it long enough to know that something is going badly wrong. XA has just published a report describing the extent to which investigations for decisions on applications by South African employers for import duty rebates or for the removal of duties, are running over the normal six months.

Some are now nearly two years old. Many more than a year old. In total, some R2.1bn of duties paid are the subject of complaint and possible legal action as a result, of duties being imposed unfairly by the Dtic and Sars. Some are for the import of products that are not even made in South Africa and are therefore not capable of being protected. This is part of the madness of central planning, of Dtic minister Ebrahim Patel’s “localisation” policies. “The process seems to be broken at the moment,” MacKay tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge.

That would be an understatement. Patel has been forced to lift punitive anti-dumping duties on chicken imports because his protection of the local industry has allowed it to overcharge for local chicken, starving the poor of vital protein. The cost of importing an electrically-powered car is still cripplingly high though, even though fuel costs have risen even more quickly than foods. And now the minister plans to try to ban the export of scrap. It is a popular move because it plays to the myth of infrastructure being stolen for export but, in fact, if it already almost impossible to export scrap and the last time it was banned, in 2020, the assault on our infrastructure reached an all time high.

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36 min
August 15, 2022 Helen Zille on the ANC polling below 40%
Sunday’s cracking headline in Rapport, “ANC falls below 40%” is the result of the ANC’s own polling, chair of the DA Federal Executive and former party leader Helen Zille reminds Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. Indeed, Rapport appears to have seen two polls, an internal ANC one warning of a “freefall” in electoral support ahead of the 2024 elections and a “confidential” poll putting the ruling party at 38 per cent on a 56 per cent turnout if the elections were held today. That same confidential poll puts the DA at 27 per cent, which Zille says she thinks is somewhat ambitious.

But, she says, the party is doing well among black voters despite recent losses of black leaders, and insists that the DA’s “blue values” are there to appeal to black voters. Recent polls, met with some scepticism among the commentariat, have the DA regaining ground lost in 2019 despite an Ipsos poll on Monday that put it at 11 per cent.

“Ipsos always gets the DA wrong,” says Zille. She doesn’t rule out a coalition with the ANC after 2024 even though “the ANC wants to be in government to loot”. But one mistake is not about to be repeated. There’ll be no deals with the EFF. In Nelson Mandela Bay, where the DA and smaller parties have put together a minority coalition to unseat a plainly incompetent ANC executive (provided the EFF doesn’t prevent it), Zille says EFF leaders are insisting she and DA leader John Steenhuisen negotiate directly with them. She absolutely refuses to do that.

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35 min
August 02, 2022 What did we need most — education or skills?
The head of Investec’s corporate social investment programme, Setlogane Manchidi, sits atop a R90m-R100m budget each year to do some good out of the glare of analysts or the advertising department. And he does.

He tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that at any one time he is in the lives of up to 4,000 young citizens at school, university and entering working life. His programme organises extra math and science classes at schools, provides bursaries to good universities and chaperones its charges into the world of work and enterprise.

But, in a way, education is an easy choice. Much of the R10bn corporate SA spend on CSI every year goes to education. It’s an easy choice. But it excludes practically, skills, which, arguably, we need more than mathematicians.

Listen as the pair discuss research that suggests fast growing economies such as China and Thailand have on average lower educational outcomes than slower ones.

What are we missing? Have we misunderstood the transmission of skills and the importance of a society being able to do a wide variety of things? Skills are passed between humans in a way that an education may not.

We have, laments Manchidi, abandoned apprenticeships. Our convention is that everything has to be a university or it doesn’t count. That’s got to be wrong. President Cyril Ramaphosa should talk to people like Setlogane Manchidi before he signs off on the next social compact. Details matter.

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31 min
July 25, 2022 Will the ANC go quietly in 2024?
Veteran South African editor and commentator Tim du Plessis tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he worries that ANC may not accept the result of a 2024 general election in which it loses badly. This is a party that knows only liberation struggle and state power, he says.

Opposition is foreign territory. In fact, since it lost power in the Western Cape, its only real experience of a major loss of power, the ANC in the province has withered on the vine and is all but dysfunctional. There’s also the worrying precedent of former ANC president hiding the contents of a report into the 2002 election in Zimbabwe, which Robert Mugabe stole until he was forced to punish it. And the Independent Electoral Commission’s handling of elections generally, Du Plessis notes dryly, is not improving. This is a kept debate for the next few years as the ANC edges towards an election loss. What may matter is how big it is.

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29 min
July 18, 2022 Flights of Fancy
The Competition Commission is investigating three (yes, three, that’s all it takes) complaints that South Africa’s domestic airlines are overcharging since the collapse of Comair at the end of May. Air travel expert and consultant Linden Birns tell Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge that he doubts the investigation will find much to complain about. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the price of jetfuel to $151 a barrel, a full 78% higher than it was a year ago. What’s an airline to do? As it is, with SAA a shadow of its former self, no SA Express, no Mango, no Kulula, no British Airways there’s about 35% less capacity domestically now, says Birns. Yes, there might of been periods when our skies have been overtraded but whether there’s room for a new airline, or whether the current players add capacity the fact is demand is growing.

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36 min
July 11, 2022 Lines in the sand
Change is coming to South African politics, former DA federal chairman and now Eastern Cape Provincial Chairman for ActionSA, Athol Trollip, tells Peter Bruce on this edition of Podcasts From the Edge. The thing is to get the ANC out of power. But Trollip is no starry-eyed idealist. Only coalitions can feasibly replace the ANC at the next election in 2024 and he knows probably better than anyone how difficult coalitions can be. Forced by conscience to fire his corrupt deputy in Nelson Mandela Bay, Trollip was himself then upended when his coalition partner turned on him. So how to get it right? Does the public have a right to know in advance who would coalesce with whom? Or to be consulted afterwards? Will independent candidates make a difference in 2024?

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33 min
June 27, 2022 Gqeberha 2022 is not Cape Town 2018
"We need political stability to get to economic stability," Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber CEO Denise van Huyssteen tells Peter Bruce as they chart their way through Gqeberha's approaching water crisis. Yes while there is no water already in many City taps, and while some local dams have run dry due to years of drought, the fact is Gqeberha has a water management problem rather than an absence of water. The problem is politics. The city has been run by unstable and squabbling coalitions since 2016, chasing the last remaining engineers and artisans out of their jobs. Now the chickens have come home to roost. In theory, enough water can be pumped in the city from the Gariep Dam hundreds of kilometers away but work is behind schedule and key pump stations don't work. Load shedding doesn't help. Van Huyssteen has finally persuaded the council to allow business to fix leaking pipes, broken sub stations and other infrastructure but its late in the day. If this doesn't work, nothing will.

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26 min
June 20, 2022 Not a moment too soon
People have been celebrating with some relief the publication of Songezo Zibi’s new book, Manifesto. It’s been a long time coming and with characteristic reticence, former Business Day Editor Zibi tells former Business Day Editor Peter Bruce in this episode of Podcasts from the Edge that he still isn’t quite ready to say quite what his new future will look like. Getting the book done was just the start but Manifesto at least makes his intentions clear. “It is Herculean,” he says of the job of forging a new think tank, the Rivonia Circle, and of creating a possibly new institution. But, he says, “in this respect, I have decided to take every step necessary to ensure that what I say here (in the book) does indeed take place”. In other words, there’s a new political party/formation/something on the horizon and it promises to be exciting. Zibi is young and smart and deeply contemptuous of our current political choices. He believes though that there is a vast mass of voters looking for an alternative to the status quo come the 2024 general elections, the ANC, the DA and the EFF. He is going to go and find them.

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33 min

About Podcasts from the Edge

From the publisher's feed

Peter Bruce, veteran South African newspaper editor and commentator, interviews the country's social and political leaders and experts in a weekly effort to explain what is actually going on in this…